Getting Value from Aces

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In a tournament you're looking to survive

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sigh

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lol.

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Yeah, I suck at reading. But if he has KQ, of course a call is best and of course he'll fold to a reraise.

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This might be an image question. When I have a stack Hero's size at these blinds, I am raising pretty frequently, and I would not be at all surprised to see a call from KQ. I know you often have a tighter image, Adanthar, so perhaps players are more likely to dump KQ to your raise.

For the record, this is not primarily a question of survival for me. I do want to give bad implied odds to hands that will not give any action unless I am beat, but I am also interested in building a pot to help me stack something like KQ, and am more than willing to give away my stack the times KQ is lucky enough to make two pair, or, heaven forbid, the AJT flop.

[adanthar]

If you play tournaments where the action goes: AA raises/KQ calls/short stack pushes/AA reraises/KQ calls the reraise, and they're > $20 buyins, I'd like to know the site and time, please. Seriously.

That's my fault not specifying the buyin, though. In a $5 or $10, of course you go ahead and push.

[M.B.E.]

Maybe if Hero and Villain had much deeper stacks, then Hero would be correct to smoothcall the SB's raise -- as long as Hero is good enough not to lose too much with the AA those times that Villain sucks out.

However, on the actual stack sizes here, Hero will just about always stack off when Villain can beat AA. Therefore it really would be a mistake here for Hero to smoothcall the SB's all-in because the impied odds that would offer to Villain are just too high if Villain has a pocket pair, and even if Villain has a suited connector his implied odds calling 480 are not too bad.

Raising to 1730 is an okay play for Hero. Actually a smaller raise than that would be better: this type of situation is one of the rare times when a minraise (to 1210) might be optimal, because it may appear to Villain that Hero is merely trying to isolate, prompting Villain to go for a reisolation play.

(If Hero's cards here were something like AJo rather than AA, then I'd similarly say that Hero's best play is to reraise to 1210.)